Been captivated by the ideal of post autistic economics. Now, when you see a Frenchman putting together a petition, my first notion is of something like the Futurist Manifesto. That is, much sound and fury signifying nothing.
However, this time the notion will not go away. I was thinking about it to myself, is there an example of added value in a societal way that is not economic value added, but is demonstrable. Then one struck me forcefully.
In accounting, if you take all of the physical assets, and add them up, this gives one, rather limited view of the organisation's value. Issue is that it does not cover the valuation that is put on the company by the market, or more especially, any purchaser of that organisation.
To give an example. Suppose Mega-Corporation buys out Huge Corporation. Huge Corporation has buildings, stock in the warehouses, and outstanding invoices receivable of about 12 billion dollars. It is owe various people like shareholders, suppliers, and so on, about 6 billion, so you would say from an strict accounting point of view that the organisation is worth 6 billion. But those mad fools at Mega-Corporation buy Huge Corporation for 10 billion dollars!
From a strict accounting point of view, then they have paid 4 billion more than they needed to for the assets. Accountants then square this circle by adding in a make believe asset called "goodwill" . In other words, Mega-Corporation is paying this money to get the reputation, brands, distribution channels, R&D capacity, and other revenue generating assets of Huge Corporation.
So, there is one of two things going on here. Either the people in charge of Mega-Corporation are as dumb as a bag of rocks, or there is indeed an asset there that defies logical valuation.
Of course, people do over-pay, and sentiment can get out of whack, as in the boom years. (Larry Ellison, always a good man for a quote, said of Ariba , the on-line supply chain stuff. "Are they really worth more than the Daimler corporation? All they have is a bunch of software that my cat could have written over a free weekend." Heh, that's a competitive assessment and a half...)
But the answer is, and we all understand this, that the value of the organisation is more than the current assets, physical, human or otherwise. This is were people like Interbrand spend a lot of time doing research and trying to asses what the brand value really is, in hard monetary terms.
And not all interactions in humans, or primates are directly economically rational, but depend on the notion of owed favours. Monkeys have a well established sense of fairness. I lend my tools to the neighbour, and he occasionally runs my kid to school. I say hello to everyone, and soon I get a network of contacts in the place where I live who make me feel like part of a community.
So, what is my point. Blogging, Internet, and Wiki. These are tools that cannot be understood (solely) through the perspective of neo-classical economics. The stored value that is in the model is not monetary. What is the value of a link from BoingBoing or Gaping Void to your blog, both from a point of view of how much effort you would invest to get it, and the future value both monetary and in wiki terms of building this kind of contact?
Thus, the post autistic economics model is interesting to me, because I feel that we need a different way to measure stored privileges and capabilities, especially where disintermediation has allowed up to come to a situation where what we have is akin to the bartering of "intellectual property. " The bazaar built Linux, and it does run in that Egyptian Taxi model, as so loving described by Eric Raymond, but the stored value is now equivalent to the real hard money invested in operating system like Windows, or MVS. What current economic measure would allow this to be determined?
So, there are many kinds of capital, and especially in the modern world, neo-classical economic theory restricts itself to the measures of only the most mechanical. How would our view of society be altered if we could also harness the measures of this less tangible capital that we are developing. Could we then make a rational argument for the Creative Commons, versus the Intellectual Property route?
I have no fixed ideas yet, but it is an interesting question that is taking up time in my thoughts.
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